Expectations and technology don’t align in smart classrooms

A survey with a population roughly equally divided among students, professors …

The governmental sales branch of the giant technology vendor CDW apparently got interested in how its wares were being deployed in the classrooms of US college campuses. To find out, it commissioned an online survey that pulled in roughly similar numbers of students, faculty, and IT staff, and quizzed them about the use of technology in the classroom. The survey finds that students perceive themselves as way ahead of their profs when it comes to deploying tech in their scholastic process, but some of the results suggest that this isn't always the product of a professorial technophobia.

The survey results have some substantial margins of error, with the numbers for faculty-specific responses being accurate only within an 11 percent range (+/- 5.5 percent). Still, some of the figures are pretty large, and it's possible to get a general sense of how tech use in the academic world is perceived. On its simplest level, most students view it as important; even liberal arts majors, who might be expected to be the Luddites of the survey population, consider technology important to their studies, and used it as part of their decision on which school to attend.

The report also cites other studies that indicate that most employers expect that colleges will educate their students in both basic IT knowledge and specific skills. I'm sure they'd like the credit market to loosen up, too, but educational institutions are no more likely to solve that problem than they are to provide IT classes. Most colleges view their mission as teaching students how to learn, rather than necessarily providing specific skills. As such, some of the figures highlighted by the report—91 percent of students don't use videoconferencing, and 73 percent don't use Wikis, for example—seem almost irrelevant, given that a clear use for these tools in the classroom isn't necessarily obvious. The whole idea of videoconferencing seems a bit silly in a context where students are spending vast sums of their parents' money in part due to a promise of personalized attention.

Whether there's a call for them in class or not, however, students are using tech toys for their college experience. Three-quarters now have laptops, and roughly sixty percent are using social networking software, MP3 players, and online course management tools. Not surprisingly, they wish their professors would get with the program. According to the survey, their top desire is that profs would fire up a chat client and hold virtual office hours, one named by 40 percent of the students.

As someone who will be holding office hours later this evening, I personally don't think the students recognize what they're asking for. Again, they're paying for personal attention, and there's nothing like seeing the mixture of bewilderment, embarrassment, and frustration on a student's face when they still don't get something after the second time through. Chat may help them avoid the embarrassment part of the equation, but only at the price of their understanding.

Schools appear to be doing well in providing tech access to their students; most provide wireless access and online course management. But fewer schools provide off-campus access to their academic network, and fewer still ensure that students have consistent access to computers, either through a laptop program or by providing sufficient seats at a computer lab.

From the prof's perspective, most say they are interested in using technology as a teaching tool and have access to training on how to use it. But few say they fully know how to do so, or operate in an environment where there's consistent access to tech in the classroom. Here, professors themselves are their harshest critics; only the IT staff views them as more technologically incompetent than they view themselves, while students seem to think they're doing pretty well. Meanwhile, students and faculty both think that classroom access to tech is limited; the IT staff, not surprisingly, thinks everything is fine.

To an extent, the largest gap present here may actually be one of expectations. Academic institutions could clearly do a better job communicating to businesses why their expectations for job-relevant training are not going to be met, and the faculty could do with letting their students know which aspects of technology actually make sense for use in a university context. With those in mind, everybody could probably do a better job of identifying those situations where improvements in technology could actually benefit everyone involved.

Further reading:

The report is available for those of you willing to submit personal information on CDW's site.